The Mets had never finished higher than ninth place in a ten-team league in their first seven seasons. As an expansion team, they went 40–120 in 1962, the most losses by an MLB team in one season in the 20th century, and the 1962 Mets' .250 winning percentage was higher than only the .248 posted by the 1935 Boston Braves.

The Mets never had been over .500 after the ninth game of any season. Seven years after their disastrous inaugural season, "The Amazin' Mets" (as nicknamed by previous manager Casey Stengel) won the World Series, the first expansion team to do so.

With great pitching and decent defense, but not much offense, the Mets were an uninspired 18–23 through their first 41 games. They then reeled off a club-record 11 straight wins, equaled on several occasions. Starting with their 42nd game, the Mets went 82–39, an impressive .678 winning percentage, the rest of the season.

In second place most of the season behind the Chicago Cubs, the Mets were in third place, 9.5 games back, on August 13.[3] They won 14 of their last 17 games during August, and 24 of their 32 games during September and October, to surge past the Cubs, finishing 100–62, eight games ahead of the Cubs. That 17 game differential is one of the largest turnarounds in MLB history.[clarification needed]

Three future Hall of Fame members were on the Mets' roster: pitcherTom Seaver (who won twenty-five games en route to winning the Cy YoungAward), a young Nolan Ryan (playing in his third season), and New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra (who briefly played for the Mets in 1965), who was their first base coach. Berra was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972, Seaver in 1992, and Ryan in 1999.

Part of the movie Frequency is set in Queens, New York, in 1969, as firefighter and avid Mets fan Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) and his family follow the "Amazin's" throughout the World Series.

In Moonlighting, Season 2, Episode 13, "In God We Strongly Suspect", when David is attempting to define the parameters of Maddie's skepticism and atheism by inviting her to provide logical explanations for various phenomena seemingly beyond man's understanding, he mentions the "'69 Mets" which she immediately dismisses as "a myth and a hoax".

In the film Men in Black 3, set shortly before the Apollo 11 launch in July 1969, Griffin, an alien from the fifth dimension who can see the future, says the Mets' title is his favorite human history moment for "all the improbabilities that helped".

In the TV show Growing Pains, the family's name was the Seavers and their neighbors were the Koosmans.